Sara Méndez’s story has all of the necessary components for a film about the military dictatorships of the Southern Cone: arbitrary arrest, torture, baby theft, a clandestine Operation Condor border crossing, a timid judiciary subject to military pressure, press censorship, and anonymity and impunity for the criminals involved. It is unique in one aspect, however: The relative searching for her disappeared child is actually the mother, who, against all odds, managed to survive her detention.
In 1973, Sara Méndez took refuge in Argentina, fleeing political repression in Uruguay. Her son Simón was born in June 1976 in Buenos Aires. When he was 21 days old, a commando unit made up of five Uruguayan soldiers burst into her home. The soldiers, operatives of Operation Condor, a transnational network of state terrorism in which Southern Cone dictatorships cooperated in fighting “subversion,” arrested Méndez and took away the infant Simón, who was never seen again. Méndez was tortured in the secret detention center Automotores Orletti, and was later taken secretly to Uruguay with 25 other prisoners, many of whom subsequently disappeared.
After four years, Méndez was freed. She lived in Buenos Aires, where she collaborated with the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and followed various leads about her missing son Simón. In 1986 she received information about a boy from Montevideo named Gerardo Vázquez, whose age and description led her to believe he might be her son. After two years of fruitless negotiations with the adoptive parents to conduct a DNA test on the child, Méndez and Mauricio Gatti, Simón’s father, finally turned to the legal system to get a court order for the test and to investigate the circumstances of the boy’s adoption.
Thus began a long, Kafkaesque journey through Uruguay’s legal system. The criminal courts threw out the case, arguing that it was covered under the 1986 impunity law. In the civil courts, two judges and the public prosecutor ruled in favor of Méndez, but after several appeals and nine years later, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of another judge’s prior rejection of Méndez’s request to determine the true identity of Gerardo Vázquez. Unable to confirm the boy’s identity, Méndez remained certain that she had found her son, but she had been denied all legal recourse to prove her case.
Last April, Sara Méndez joined the delegation of Mothers and Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared that met with the new president, Jorge Batlle, who affirmed his desire to help uncover the truth. Shortly thereafter, the President called on Gerardo Vázquez and urged him to take the DNA test. The young man, now 24, agreed to do so. The test results were unequivocal: Gerardo Vázquez was not Sara Méndez’s son.
After 13 years of waiting to know the truth, Méndez found herself again at ground zero in the search for her son. Thirteen years lost, 13 years of pain and impotence, and several responsible parties: the Vázquez family, who systematically refused to administer the blood test; the judges who backed this decision, refusing to grant Méndez her maternal rights; and, primarily, the military men who kidnapped and “disappeared” Simón. For 13 years, these military men witnessed the very public drama surrounding Méndez’s search for her son, knowing that she was following a false lead, but they remained silent. Today, they live under the same sky, in the same city with their victims, enjoying total freedom and total impunity, and no one, not even the President, dares to demand that they take responsibility for their criminal acts.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
María Delgado is a founding member of the Uruguayan branch of Servicio Paz y Justicia, a human rights network with offices in eight Latin American countries. She is also a member of the Steering Council of SIPAZ, a human rights group based in Chiapas. Translated from the Spanish by NACLA.
